Beginning writers need to be taught how to write an essay in the
context of writing an essay.
English educators call this the process approach to writing,
or often just process writing.
Although writing has many components, you cannot practice the components
in isolation and hope to come out with a decent piece of writing.
Parts do not add up to a whole any more than the scrambled letters
in the photo add up to a sonnet.
Analogies to writing process
If you want tips on teaching how to write an essay, look at how
people teach other skills.
Imagine teaching a kid to play clarinet. You cannot expect the
kid to play clarinet if you spend a week teaching musical notation,
a week on care of reeds, a week on fingering, and three days on
breathing techniques.
Because playing clarinet is a complex skill, you have to teach
all those skills as you teach the whole process of clarinet
playing. The clarinets will squeak and the wrong notes will make
you wince. That's what happens with beginners.
Or think about swimming.
You rarely hear of Olympic swimmers coming from desert areas,
do you? You can teach about swimming on the shore, but
you cannot teach swimming until the learners are in the
water.
Beginners will splash around and probably swallow a mouthful of
water or two. Those occurrences are inevitable: the learner must
interact with the environment in order to learn the skill of swimming.
Total immersion is essay writing's key
To learn how to write an essay students must practice essay writing.
Students cannot achieve competence by practicing parts of the
essay writing process in isolation.
The simplest way to start is to give students class-related writing
prompts that include:
Giving students a thesis or a good start on one is like putting
them in the swimming pool so you can teach them the basics of swimming.
Having incompetent writers come up with their own topics is like
telling nonswimmers to swim a mile: most will go under fast.
Go against the flow
Since Donald Murray published A Writer Teaches Writing in
1968, we've been told that the only way to teach writing was to
let students take total charge of their writing.
That procedures has become the norm in schools and colleges —
and overall student writing has suffered.
I suspect there are three reasons for the dismal lack of success
of Murray's method:
Most teachers are not professional writers.
Murray taught a highly select group of students who were already
competent writers.
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Today's students are vastly different than Murray's students
in the '60s.
A very good writer whose students who are already competent writers
can use Murray's techniques. But if you are not a professional
writer mentoring would-be pros, better stick to a program amateurs
can handle.
Partial frustration is inevitable
Writing is a frustrating business, even if you are pretty good
at it.
Your students and mine will get very frustrated when we require
them to write. And if we want students to learn how to write an
essay, a task that requires serious thinking, they freak out.
They expect instant results, instant gratification. Writing doesn't
provide instant anything. To those students I say, tough beans.
Writing teachers will be frustrated, too. They won't see quick
results. They won't be entertained by lively writing. They won't
have their lives enriched by the seminal thinking in seventh grade
papers.
To those teachers I say, tough beans.
The best alternative we can provide is to teach
students to write an essay in a series of stages or tasks each
of which ends in some written product that provides feedback on
their effort.
Published 10-Apr-2008; updated:
15-Jun-2010
